MINGO JUNCTION, Ohio -- Shortly after graduating from high school and completing a technical program, Don Hutchison, 66, got a job working for what was then known as Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel.

When he retired 41 years later, the company was called RG Steel, which in 2011 had acquired the assets that once belonged to Wheeling Pittsburgh after the company went out of business. Hutchison commuted for a couple of years to a plant in West Virginia before hanging it up.

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"I said, that's enough for me, because that was a young man's place, and I wasn't a young man anymore," Hutchison said.

RG Steel now is defunct, and since has sold the Mingo Junction mill where Hutchison used to work to a recycling company. Although the new owner hopes to re-open the mill in a limited capacity, the jury's out on whether that will happen.

"It's just a shell of what it used to be, even if they get it up and running," Hutchison said.

Hutchison, who identifies as a political independent, said he and others are "fed up" with the region's struggling economy, and have taken notice of Donald Trump's promises to bring back American manufacturing and coal mining. He is a pro-life Christian, and he and his wife thought Trump would better reflect their views than Hillary Clinton would. His oldest son is in the U.S. Army, and his daughter is married to an Air Force pilot, and he liked what Trump had to say about keeping the military strong.

So, he said, he was willing to give Trump a shot. So is the formerly heavily Democratic area where he lives.

"I don't know that everything he's doing is right," said Hutchison, a longtime volunteer firefighter who's now the chief for the Brilliant Fire Department. "It remains to be seen if he's going to be successful. But I think that people were pretty much fed up with the whole Washington political system, and they were looking for change."

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